Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Paradoxes of Blood: From the Madres' Queer Mourning to the Kirchnerist Era
- 2 Black Humour and the Children of the Disappeared
- 3 Undoing the Cult of the Victim: Los Rubios, M and La mujer sin cabeza
- 4 The Cooking Mother: Hebe de Bonafini and the Conversion of the Former ESMA
- 5 The Attire of (Post-)Memory: Mi vida después
- 6 Kinship, Loss and Political Heritage: Los topos and Kirchner's Death
- Conclusion: The Recovery of the House
- Afterword
- Bibliography and Filmography
- Index
6 - Kinship, Loss and Political Heritage: Los topos and Kirchner's Death
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Paradoxes of Blood: From the Madres' Queer Mourning to the Kirchnerist Era
- 2 Black Humour and the Children of the Disappeared
- 3 Undoing the Cult of the Victim: Los Rubios, M and La mujer sin cabeza
- 4 The Cooking Mother: Hebe de Bonafini and the Conversion of the Former ESMA
- 5 The Attire of (Post-)Memory: Mi vida después
- 6 Kinship, Loss and Political Heritage: Los topos and Kirchner's Death
- Conclusion: The Recovery of the House
- Afterword
- Bibliography and Filmography
- Index
Summary
In this final chapter, I put forward an analysis of Los topos (‘The Moles’, 2008), a novella by the Argentine author Félix Bruzzone, both of whose parents were murdered during the dictatorship. Although the biography of the author seems to continue the tradition that stipulates that only those who were ‘directly affected’ by violence are entitled to the rights of remembering, I will make the case that Los topos works as a counter-performance to the idea of the ‘wounded family’ as the only victim of the military violence. More than this, Los topos provides a queer, insurgent and ironic version of the performance of blood, one that suggests a more fluid entanglement among kinship, loss and political heritage. My proposal, then, is to read Bruzzone's novella alongside the radicalisation of the struggles around the past which have emerged in the country since Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took office in 2007. In this context, Bruzzone's book can be conceived as an enhanced response to the black humour that permeated H.I.J.O.S.' organisation during the mid-1990s, at the same time that it assesses the contradictions and limitations of a politics of mourning when it becomes officialised. Although Los topos was published in 2008, I ultimately suggest that Bruzzone's fiction not only prefigured the affective environment that surrounded Néstor Kirchner's death in October 2010, but also envisaged the expanded language of kinship that is currently in play in contemporary Argentina.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina's DictatorshipThe Performances of Blood, pp. 129 - 150Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014